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Make first impressions that last…

After a competitive and time consuming recruitment process, you’ve (read recruiter) finally selected the best candidate for the job. The hiring manager is relieved, and you’re on to the next role to fill. Time is ticking, and the hiring manager usually has anywhere between 1-4 weeks wait before this new hire commences their role.

The new hire is excited, and spreading their good news amongst their family and friends about joining your organisation. Filled with hopes and dreams of making new friends, kicking goals and getting a paycheck soon, the new hire has no idea what he/she is about to step in to. This should be as exciting as going to watch a film you’ve been waiting to be released for months. Now if the film has too many trailers and advertisements before the main event, the film will lose some of its impact and certainly ‘lose’ the interest of the viewer. Similarly, if the new hire gets buried in filling out paperwork they will lose that excitement of joining a new organisation.

So how do organisations make that first impression that lasts? The impression that says ‘Welcome’ ; ‘We’re excited to have you’ ; ‘We want to get to know you and prepare you for working with us’ ; ‘We want to show you the ropes’ ?

This is truly when Onboarding begins

Between the time when the new hire is still excited about working with your organisation and the day/week they commence, this is truly when onboarding begins.

Sobering negative statistics like poor hiring and onboarding practices leading to failure rates of over 50% of new starters and encouraging positive statistics such as nearly 80% of formal onboarding to achieve their first performance milestone fuel the Onboarding buzz. Surveys indicate average $11,000 employee recruitment cost so if an organisation is experiencing higher than desirable attrition levels within the twelve months justifying the ROI for Successful Onboarding would appear to be straightforward.

Most medium sized organisations typically go through approximately a 20-50 step process between contract production; probation through to formalising employment. These steps usually take approximately 30 days if they are all executed on time by every single person involved. This is certainly not easy and in many organisations not achievable with their existing processes. So amidst all these tedious processes, how do you ensure you don’t lose sight of the success of the new hire, onbaord them and make a lasting first impression but still get those efficiencies in your process?

Keep it simple, engaging and easy

Most of us have experienced those awkward first few weeks at a new job and thought about making a swift exit because our new home is ‘not for me’ or ‘not what I expected’. Typically coupled with feeling disconnected. This is where Cognology Onboarding provides easy employee information collection and forms automation efficiencies, but more importantly gives you an opportunity to impress new hires by:

Welcoming and helping integrate the individual

Ensuring the new hire understands their new employer, workplace and surrounding

Enabling the new talent to be productive faster and make an immediate contribution versus feeling lost

With a clean user interface, you can start providing highly engaging social content and access to all the new hire needs to be up and running from the day they commence. You can engage with the new hires by helping them find their way around the office, location, find the best latte’ or invite them to be part of your social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter even before they’ve commenced work.

With a simple philosophy: How to bring people together, align them to strategy and achieve great things, the team at Cognology are continuously creating an (systemic) environment that not only welcomes your new recruits but gives you the opportunity to make a great first impression.

For recruiting and HR professionals, Cognology makes all those administrative tasks of contract generation, document management and acknowledgements a breeze. They also ensure that tracking of probation isn’t cumbersome.

For managers and HR operations, there are neat dashboards that give you visual counts of people going through various onboarding steps at a glance.

The features that excite me though by far are:

inforgraphic style insights – yes you can chuck those boring table format excel like reports out of the proverbial window. Welcome to visually stimulating actionable insights that are inbuilt (yes you have to pay no extra for that!) and aimed at continuous improvement enablement.

it is mobile responsive; including email and sms notifications

a simple, intuitive and logical onboarding process that you can concoct entirely to meet your needs by simply using the ‘drag and drop’ feature for your onboarding steps.Cognology Onboarding offers the means to transform your onboarding process as well as benefiting from time and cost efficiencies. Start now, to make that first impression that lasts. Getting started with Cognology is easy, just book in a demo!